position. A film of sweat and dirt covered his face. He was nervous. Salid, the young fighter carrying an AK-47, was trailing behind. The boy was supposed to be protecting them but had been caught up by excitement. He was anxious to become a martyr, and Awwad was constantly reminding him that their job was to stay alive and stop any attempt by the Saudi soldiers to rescue the foreigners who were under attack in Khobz. The young Salid disregarded the lectures and was falling far off the pace.
“Keep up!” Awwad demanded. “Forget the other fight!”
“I should be back there, helping our brothers slay the infidels.”
“Be quiet, boy. Carry out your assignment!”
The 40 mm rocket launcher rested easily on Awwad’s right shoulder as he moved toward the illuminated missile base. He had scouted the area and found a large concrete culvert that ran beneath the road to connect the drainage canals. He dropped into the crossing ditch and slithered into the culvert. “Now we wait,” he said.
There was no response, no hurrying footsteps. Awwad took a deep breath, listened, then cursed. Salid had given into the craving for action, the lust for blood and glory that could override good sense. Son of a pig!
Awwad adjusted. Children should not be trusted with important assignments. He would have to carry out the ambush on his own and would fire his RPG when the first vehicle, most likely a Humvee or a small truck, came out of the base camp. That would block the road, idle the rest of the rescue convoy, and force a delay while officers assessed the danger. While they were doing that, Awwad would disappear, for there could be no follow-up shot. Salid had taken the only other RPG round with him.
SWANSON WATCHED THE MAN in the rear hesitate, then stop instead of following the leader who carried the RPG. For some reason, this one was not advancing, but just standing there with an AK hanging around his shoulders. A wolfish grin spread over Swanson’s face.
He moved with a quiet grace, soft and low to the ground, invisible to the hesitating fighter who was blind to the darkness. Swanson found a crumpled depression in the side of the ditch, slipped into it, and lay on his belly in the dry sand. The night vision goggles clearly painted the fighter who was only five steps away and standing, undecided.
The fighter looked back toward the RPG man, who hissed,
The loud whisper of a younger voice responded:
The rifleman was concentrating his attention back the way he had come, looking past the prone Swanson, attracted by the sounds and flashes of distant gunfire. He took one more step forward to follow his leader, then decided to go back to the guns. He started running back down the ditch, out of breath, panting with anticipation.
KYLE ROSE LIKE A specter as the young man passed, and threw an anaconda on him. Swanson’s right forearm wrapped around the front of the neck to crush the windpipe, while his left hand grabbed his right to increase the leverage. Immediately, all air was cut off to the boy’s brain and Swanson snatched him from his feet with the rear naked choke hold. Swanson knelt down, taking his opponent with him, then lay on his back and flattened out, clamping both legs around the victim for a full body lock, steadily squeezing harder the entire time. Salid was out cold within fifteen seconds without having uttered a sound.
When the body went limp, Kyle rolled out, stood, slung the prisoner across his shoulder and returned to his secluded hide behind the garbage bags.
In seconds, he had the kid blindfolded and gagged, with his arms tied behind him, but the legs left free. Swanson looped the sling of the AK-47 around the young fighter’s throat, twisted it once and let the weapon dangle down the back. If the prisoner tried to run, Kyle could just yank on the AK and choke him back into submission.
Swanson roughly awakened the youngster, jerked him to his feet and gave him a push. Sticking to the darker patches, Kyle soon found the service road that looped around the edge of the city to a side gate of the base. He slowed, moving cautiously until he closed to within a kilometer of the mesh steel fence that was topped with concertina wire. Despite being able to hear the gunfire back at the foreign compound and knowing an ambush was waiting at the front gate, Swanson did not hurry, adhering firmly to his own prime rule: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. He shoved the prisoner to the ground, sat on the young man’s back and took time to study the target through the Cyclops. Careful surveillance was seldom time wasted.
On its surface, the base had the primary purpose of supplying a guard force of several hundred men to protect the oil production, storage and shipment apparatus in the area. As part of that assignment, it supposedly maintained a contingent of antiaircraft missiles that could spread the protective umbrella out beyond the rigs. It was reasonable to assume that it was all part of the same package, but Swanson tried never to assume anything.
Remembering the map in the Boykin Group basement, he knew the base was sliced into four equal parts. A perimeter road followed all the way around inside the fence line. A north-south road ran from the main gate to the far side of the camp, dead-ending at the fence. It was bisected in the middle by an east-west route which emptied onto the supply road where Swanson waited. The headquarters building was in the middle: a standard military layout, there was genius in its simplicity. Everyone could get anywhere smoothly.
Soldiers and vehicles were surging toward the front of the compound, with troops running from the living quarters located in the uppermost left hand corner. Several Humvees tore out of the motor pool and equipment area in the lower left quadrant and gunners were already standing in the vehicles behind machine guns. Officers coming from smaller buildings in the upper right hand quarter were marrying up the troops and vehicles, putting together a rescue mission for the besieged foreigners. Swanson heard the orders being shouted and the motors revving.
So if this was an AA base, where were the antiaircraft missile sites? It would have been logical to have them in protected hard stands with open fields of fire all around, probably near the corners to eliminate obstructions. Instead, he found the missiles nestled near a long, narrow building in the area closest to him. A group of three Humvees sat in a line, the lead one decked out with aerials, which denoted the command and operations vehicle. The next two Humvees had bulky pedestals on the rear deck, where gunners would sit between reloadable pods of heat-seeking Stinger missiles. The group presented a genuine threat against any marauding helicopters or low-flying planes. They remained idle tonight because they were not needed in the coming urban fight.
Swanson thought for a moment, then spoke in Arabic to his prisoner. “Junior, here’s a free scout-sniper lesson for your future military career: More important than just seeing something is to know what you’re looking at. The only reason for having those missiles on wheels is to move them somewhere. Let’s go look inside that building.”
29
NO BULLETS WERE COMING his way, so Fatehi Awwad knew he had not been seen crouching beside the culvert. He sighted his RPG launcher on the main road coming out of the base and patiently waited for his enemies to play their part. The crossbar arm at the guard shack was being raised and four Humvees were ready to move out in column, their big engines rumbling and the huge tires crunching on the road. As the first one came out, Awwad sighted on it and pressed the trigger.
An igniter exploded a ball of gas inside the RPG launcher and flung the pointed antipersonnel grenade from the front end of the tube while the enormous back-blast from the rear disappeared in the ditch behind him. The rocket covered the first eleven meters of flight in a tenth of a second, then automatically armed itself. Stabilizer fins popped out. A fuse kicked in the propulsion system, and the Russian-made grenade increased to 294 meters per second, with a clockwise spin. Designed to penetrate armor, it easily bored into the Humvee and exploded with full fury inside.
The explosion tore the lead vehicle apart and killed four soldiers. The wrecked and burning Humvee plugged the gateway, stopping the convoy before it started. Soldiers opened fire, shooting blindly beyond the edge of the lights,
